Readers recommend: songs about adolescence

There is a scene of enormous, wordless poignancy in Napoleon Dynamite, in which Napoleon and his fellow sad sacks haunt the fringes of their high school prom while Alphaville's power ballad Forever Young echoes round the hall. For them, you realise, to be forever young would be a cruel and unusual punishment.

Thankfully, we're not all Napoleon Dynamite, but unless you happen to be that smirking twerp from Skins, chances are your adolescence isn't/wasn't a non-stop joyride. Teenagers are horny, insecure, idealistic, conflicted, self-righteous and self-loathing. They make for good music. Even the most exciting teenage songs have a tang of anxiety, whether it's the unsated desire in Teenage Kicks, or the dread shadow of daddy threatening to confiscate the T-Bird in Fun Fun Fun.

You could argue that almost every song from rock'n'roll's first decade was fundamentally about adolescence, vibrating with frustration at parental strictures and treating every romantic hiccup as if it were the end of the world. Dion and the Belmonts are maddened by hormones on A Teenager in Love's U-rated angst.

While the parents in C'mon Everybody or Wouldn't It Be Nice are implacable killjoys to be avoided rather than resisted. My Generation hoists its middle finger at them. The Who fixated on adolescence long after they'd outgrown it, but never with such zeal. Roger Daltrey stutters with indignation, mischievously telling his oppressors to ffff-fade away. He'd find common ground with smart-aleck punks the Adverts, whose Bored Teenagers is as eloquent as its title is blunt. Sonic Youth salute, and demonstrate, the cathartic force of a good, loud guitar in Teen Age Riot: "You're never gonna stop all the teenage leather and booze."

It's not all leather and booze, though. Nina Simone used the title of Lorraine Hansberry's unfinished play To Be Young, Gifted and Black to celebrate the potential of the post-civil rights generation, whose adolescence was so much brighter than her own. I've chosen Bob & Marcia's reggae version. More bittersweet memories in When We Were Young by Irish band Whipping Boy: "When we were young nobody knew/Who you were or what you'd do/ Nobody had a past that catches up on you."

Seventeen is a potent age in pop: just think of Abba's untouchable dancing queen. Saturnine synth-poppers Ladytron breathe a cautionary word in her ear, reducing the desires of the fashion industry and lecherous older men to one taunting refrain: "They only want you when you're 17/ When you're 21 you're no fun." To be undesirable even at 17 means social oblivion for Janis Ian, sat at home "inventing lovers on the phone" in a song just the right side of mawkish.

Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides is a teen movie like no other: mysterious, erotic and exquisitely morbid. The characters communicate via classic rock but the deadly beauty of Air's theme tune evokes all that goes unsaid. Finally, Big Star's Thirteen has a vulnerability Brian Wilson or Frankie Lymon would have understood. "Rock'n'roll is here to stay," but adolescence, thankfully, passes.